With reference to Satyavrat Mishra’s report, “No one can beat Modi in 2019: Nitish” (August 1), what an irony that the Bihar chief minister and Janata Dal-United (JD-U) president, a bete noire of the Prime Minister since 2014, is now all praise for him. Nitish Kumar went to the extent of saying that nobody had the strength to compete with Narendra Modi and that the Opposition was in no shape to counter him. Of course, Kumar claimed that he had no option but to walk out of the Grand Alliance as continuing in it would have meant “compromising with corruption” — a reference to the charges against his former deputy and Lalu Prasad’s son, Tejashwi Yadav, and other members of his family.
The moot question is: Was the alleged corruption involving Prasad and his family members an overnight development? Why such a sudden change of heart for Kumar? The chief minister is acting as if he is on a moral high ground after breaking away from the Grand Alliance, which had Prasad’s Rashtriya Janata Dal as one of its constituents. Kumar was wise to work out a game plan to seize power in Bihar again by hobnobbing with the Modi-led National Democratic Alliance. Taken aback by Kumar’s decision, Prasad started spewing venom against him. But it is Kumar who is sitting pretty in the company of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and other allied parties.
The old saying goes: Necessity is the mother of invention. In the modern era, political necessity is the mother of all sorts of holy and unholy need-based combinations. The alliance between the BJP and the JD-U in Bihar proves there are no permanent foes or friends in politics.
Kumar Gupt Panchkula
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